Presently, the most relevant data and information on individuals, companies and products is spread across a wide variety of increasingly complicated websites. Getting to a person's profile, a company's management team, a restaurant's menu, or a retailer's daily special is a time-consuming and multi-step process. Traditionally, access to such web resources are achieved by one three ways: a) search engine; b) traversing a link (e.g., hyperlink) to the web resource; or c) typing the universal resource location (URL) to the web resource letter-by-letter.
Some solutions have been employed in order to mitigate the problems attributed with Internet search. For example, short URL services provide redirect services based on short URLs, thereby obviating the need to type in long and complex URLs. Other examples include bar codes and QR codes, which generally target the print-to-web problem by making a connection to a website through a smartphone that scans the bar code/QR code and redirects the smartphone user to an associated web page (e.g., or saves the associated URL to the smartphone).
However, such solutions are plagued by their own problems. For instance, short URL services often utilize dynamically generated URLs that are generally nonsensical and, thus hard to remember despite how short the URL. This can make remember the URL hard to remember when the URL is received in “offline” situations (e.g., verbally). With respect to bar codes and QR codes, the code is generally unintelligible without use of a smartphone, or similar computing device, that is configured to receive and translate the code to an intelligible URL. Additional, remembering a bar code or QR code without the assistance of a computing device would be next to impossible. Additionally, with respect to short URL service and bar codes/QR codes, typically the URL or code (using a computing device) for the specific purpose of referencing a given web page.